Andrea Rossi (entrepreneur)

Andrea Rossi (born 3 June 1950) is an Italian entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud in the 1990s, and who claims to have invented a cold fusion device.

In the 1970s, Rossi falsely claimed to have invented a process to convert organic waste into oil, and in 1978 he founded a company named Petroldragon to process waste. In the early 1990s, the company collapsed upon discovery that it was dumping toxic waste into the environment, and Rossi was jailed and later convicted for tax fraud and environmental crime.

In 2008, after moving to the United States, Rossi attempted to patent a device called an Energy Catalyzer (or E-Cat), which is a purported cold fusion or Low-Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) thermal power source. Rossi claims that the device produces massive amounts of excess heat that can be used to produce electricity, but independent attempts to reproduce the effect have failed.

On August 25, 2015, Rossi was granted US Patent No. 9,115,913 for what is described as an apparatus for heating fluids.